I would argue with that slightly. Only because I'm awaiting a GPT powered watch similar to a sci-fi terminal any day now. No screen, just microphone and some response mechanism.
It’s Siri whenever Siri gets hooked up to a LLM, which will probably happen within the next year or two. I’m not sure why this idea would take the form of a watch.
The reason why watches still have faces is:
1. To be fashionable
2. To see the time and other information quickly without speaking
Otherwise, there is no reason to buy one. The “smart” in the smartwatch is frosting on top of the cake. The “cake” is the watch’s main function as jewelry that tells time.
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/watch-ma...
https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/accessories/watches-jew...
Of course it’s jewelry. If it wasn’t there wouldn’t be a gazillion different band and finish colors. Apple switches watch bands out seasonally and changes the available metal finishes of the device with every iteration.
It might not be jewelry you like, but it’s jewelry.
The utilitarian market was all people wearing cheap Casios and Seikos just to see the time. These people stopped wearing watches when they started carrying mobile phones (not even smartphones, this happened in the 00's).
The Apple Watch brought these people back for utility - either seeing notifications on their wrist, or health/sports tracking. People still don't really need to see the time on their wrist, phones even have always-on OLED screens now.
Now that you've decided to wear an Apple Watch, of course you're going to choose a band that looks nice, sure that part is jewelry, but not any more than a smartphone case. But nobody goes "oh wow that Apple Watch band is gorgeous, I'm going to buy and start wearing an Apple Watch for it"
I don't think there is much to glean from the industry revenue because there's so much noise going on (the massive growth of the Chinese luxury market from zero)
And yes, I would argue that a smartphone case is jewelry. I would argue that the phones themselves are also jewelry!
The fact that Apple brought back people who had stopped wearing watches just shows that there was demand for that sort of thing, and it was being unmet by traditional watches. People still want to see the time quickly but they now demand more than that.
Yes, we segment out the luxury watch and commodity watch markets. Both of those markets are growing as a whole.
Seems like a no brainer move.